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July1947: Portrait of Art Hodes, Kaiser Marshall, Henry (Clay) Goodwin, Sandy Williams and Cecil (Xavier) Scott

Times Square, New York City, USA
(William Gottlieb / Library of Congress)

Although born in Ukraine, jazz pianist Art Hodes was brought up in Chicago and spent most of his career in ‘The Windy City’. Hodes became known for the Chicago jazz style, but in order to find success, he had to move to New York in 1938.

Here, Hodes and his River Boat Jazz Band – Joseph ‘Kaiser’ Marshall on drums, Henry ‘Clay’ Goodwin on trumpet, Sandy Williams on trombone and Cecil ‘Xavier’ Scott on clarinet and tenor sax – are playing on a horse-drawn cart to promote their concert that night. They are accompanied by special guests Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden.

Writer and self-taught photographer William P. Gottlieb spent ten years between 1938 and 1948 interviewing and photographing the leading, largely New York-based jazz musicians of the time, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday. A columnist for the Washington Post, Gottlieb started to take his own pictures when the Post wouldn’t pay a photographer.

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‘Go back as far as you like – to the very beginnings of jazz. You’ll find that the jazz people were making this music on any instrument they could lay their hands on. People were saying something on anything they could find; the lack of a lacquered horn didn’t keep you from telling your story. That was the big thing – the story.’

Art Hodes, Down Beat magazine, 1964